Once in a house on fire

by Ashworth, Andrea, 1969-

  My mother creamed cool Germolene under my eye and let me go.

  I sat in front of the television, caressing the marbles in my cardigan pocket. Two gold-swirled globes got from the corner shop, plus five smaller ones won, scooting, against the school yard wall. When I wouldn't give them back, the boys had turned nasty.

  'Bloody foreigner,' one lad had started. 'Bloody Paki!'

  Bloody Paki, bloody Paki, bloody Paki, and when my shoe shot out to shut him up, his dirty fist smacked into the side of my face.

  Not one tear spilled and still seven marbles clacking in my pocket: glassy tiger eyes winking under the scratches, after skidding across the tarmac to be lost and won and lost and won and plunged into the best pocket at the end of the day.

  While I scooted marbles and swapped football stickers with pasty-faced strangers, Laurie took to biting her toenails in front of the telly. She was able to twist her foot right up into her mouth to nibble at the nails.

  'Doesn't it hurt?' I frowned, fascinated by her contortions.

  She looked at me, chewed her toenails, and said nothing.

  When Auntie Vera spotted her twisting her feet up into her face, she told my mother:

  'She's got talent, your Laurie. A proper litde Houdini. She should take up ballet or some such.'

  'Aye,' my mother sighed. 'But the lessons cost the earth.'

  Before long, Laurie started to sleepwalk.

  Our mother zipped us into our tight Sunday frocks, folded a vinegary pound note into my palm, and sent us up to the church hall for the Thursday Dance Extravaganza Night. Inside, the lights went down and a silvery ball started twirling, slowly, on the end of a wire. Slushy music crackled out of the walls; everyone slipped off their sweaty anoraks. In a sea of bare shoulders, sequins and fantastically high heels, Laurie and I stuck out as if we were naked, in our nylon poppy dresses with their strangling collars and cuffs that cut into our wrists. Our sandals left us shorter than everyone else, all tottering about on strappy satin slippers.

  'This isn't ballet.' Laurie tugged me off the dance floor. 'Let's not.'

  We turned the pound note that was meant to buy us tangoes and cha-cha-chas into Caramacs and Quavers and a curvy bottle of Coca-Cola, shared through two stripy straws. Then we pressed against the wall with all the mothers and little brothers, guzzling in the dark, while the sequins spun around and around in glittering silver circles.

  'They're lovely, they are.' Laurie was mesmerized by the dresses. 'But it's not ballet.'

  We were lying on the rug in front of the fire one Friday night when the telephone rang next to the bible.

  'It's Himself,' our mother whispered to Auntie Vera. She

  strangled the wire to stretch it across the room into the kitchen. Murmurs seeped under the door to mix with the fire's crackling and the hollow telly laughter.

  By the time our mother came into the room and slipped the phone back in its place, the laughter had died, and a sad-looking man in a tie was reading the news. Her face looked hot and flustered.

  'Time for a bath, girls,' she said.

  I looked up from where I lay on my belly next to the fire.

  'What - tonight, Mum?'

  Only on Sundays was the boiler clanked on to heat up the water for our bath. Then the whole house hopped in and out of the ancient tub - two at a time, oldest first - to make the most of the water before it turned cold.

  'Yes, madam - tonight.' Our mother waited for us to haul ourselves off the carpet, drowsy with the warmth of the fire. 'Your father's paying you a visit in the morning.'

  Laurie, Sarah and I folded into the tub, a crush of pink and brown elbows and knees. Our mother washed our backs and scrubbed our hair with the block of household soap that Auntie Vera used on Fridays to rub stains out of knicker gussets and ground-in grey collars.

  'What's he coming for. Mum?' Laurie stuck her neck out to ask.

  Our mother was ruthless with the green soap brick. 'Don't be silly now.'

  Laurie peered over the bath rack at me. I squinted back through the lather. Our mother pulled the plug, and we clambered out, shivering wet, smelling as if we had been carved out of green carbolic soap.

  Sarah was done up in pink, cherry bobbles in her white blonde pigtails, and matching cherry socks. She sat where she had

  been plonked in front of the telly to watch cartoons, giggling and looking shiny, like someone else's sister. There had been a time when kissing her was like eating, Laurie's cheek had been egg custard until Sarah turned up milkier and more yeasty. But now it was Laurie I was hungry for again, since Sarah's skin tasted like boiled cabbage, or processed peas out of a can.

  'Keep your mucky paws off!' Our stepfather had always warned us when he caught us playing with our baby sister in Canada. He had drawn a line around her, spiky as barbed wire.

  Our mother let Laurie and me wear the matching lemon cardigans that Gran had knitted to help her get through wet and windy nights in her lonely high-rise flat.

  'My tummy hurts,' I said.

  'Shh.' My mother rubbed the muscles over my stomach and smoothed back my hair. 'Don't go getting the collywobbles -your dad'U be here in a minute and it'll all be hunky-dory.'

  She sent Laurie and me to stand on Auntie Vera's gleaming red doorstep, where we could wave at our stepfather the minute he came chugging up the street.

  He looked taller than ever, stepping out of his van.

  'Hiya, kids.' Our stepfather hugged us with tears in his eyes. His collar let off sly whiffs of Briit that battled with the green carbolic armour scrubbed into our skin.

  'Hiya, Dad,' we muttered to please our mother. 'Hiya.' Above his ear, where we had seen the teapot's spout smash into his skull, a white half-moon scar curved gently along the temple. He had combed streaks of brilliantine through his curls to keep them under control. We gave him quick, prickly kisses then stepped back, shrinking to get lost in the clutter of Auntie Vera's crystal and brass.

  'Give your dad a proper hug,' our mother insisted, when he pulled us on to his lap, then rustled a white paper bag into each of our fists.

  'Sarsparilla!' My bag was crammed with red lozenges. Laurie's held tons of pear drops. A week's wofth of sucking on our personal favourites.

  'How did you know?' Laurie inched out of his lap, looking at the boiled sweets as if one would never get past her lips.

  'Oh,' our stepfather smiled at our mother, pleased with himself, 'a little birdy.'

  Laurie watched our mother smiling back at him over the sweets.

  She freed herself from his knees. 'I'm going to have mine out the back.'

  Our stepfather let Laurie go, since she was known to be odd. Because I was supposed to be normal, I stayed squashed up with Sarah in my stepfather's lap, sucking sarsaparilla after sarsaparilla, so as not to rub him up the wrong way. Eventually he got up for a heart-to-heart with my mother, behind the kitchen door. I slipped out into the back fields to find Laurie.

  She looked like a lemon, stuck up the tree near the telemast, where we were forbidden from playing since old men were wont to wander around with their zips down, flourishing something awfiil in the long grass. Clouds rumbled and darkened. I took off into the grass, tearing through it to get to her.

  Pear drops were pinging out of the tree, as if it were crying. I climbed right up to the top to join my little sister. We swayed in the highest branches, daring them to crack while we looked out over England: millions of chimneys huddling together under a bad-tempered sky.

  Rain came, sudden and heavy, whooshing down to drench us. We tried scrambling, but neither Laurie nor I knew how to get out of the top branches. It was all snagging cardies and

  slimy wood sliding under our sandals. The grass was a long way down - worlds away. We had to sway in the sky, tasting petrol in the rain, until our stepfather spotted us and came storming out of the house. We watched him striding closer and closer, until he snarled up through the branches, swearing at us to jump.

  'We can't,' I shivered. 'We're stuc
k.'

  His forehead glowed in the rain. 'Get the flick down this second!'

  Laurie and I grabbed hands and jumped and crashed our knees into the ground.

  In the warmth of Auntie Vera's kitchen our stepfather belted Laurie and me across our backsides before we were allowed to dry ourselves in front of the oven, A terrible prickle ran down my back and clawed into my bottom before the whack.

  You can't do that any more, I wanted to tell him. You re not our father, you know.

  But my legs were wet and livid with stinging. I bit my lip and swallowed salty blood down the back of my mouth until it was time for tea. Then we sat without speaking around the table, while our stepfather cracked God jokes right under the nose of the crucified Jesus, and tucked into toad-in-the-hole. We watched him losing himself in sausages and Yorkshire pudding.

  'Nah, don't bother.' He wiped his mouth and waved his hand when Auntie Vera offered to stick the ketde on for one more brew. 'I've got to be getting back, like.'

  My mother's face fell while ours rose inside.

  'Bye, Dad.' We lined up for the last brisdy brush against his face. 'Bye.'

  In the wake of his visit, our mother couldn't keep from wittering on about Canada.

  'Paradise, it was.'

  Auntie Vera let her muse over mountains and the sea and the Seatde Space Needle, where our stepfatler had paid extra to whirr our mother up-to the restaurant at the top. Steamed mussels and proper, real champagne, they had, revolving over North America.

  'It was another life. Vera,' she sighed, stuck in her reverie.

  'What about all that frinny business, though?' Auntie Vera shifted in her seat. You could almost see her mind fidgeting, fiiU of the gory details Auntie Pauline and she often gossiped about on the phone during the day, while my mother was in town. 'It can't have been worth it, Lorraine.'

  My mother pursed her lips over the other world in her cup. 'You don't know the whole story.'

  She was convinced that a part of Auntie Vera, and of Auntie Pauline too, had danced a little jig of triumph when she came scurrying back with no money and her tail between her legs, leaving the dream stuck in the mountains.

  'The thing I could never get over,' my mother stared into the dregs of her cup, 'was how such ugly vile things could be happening in such a beautifiil place. All them mountains and the sea so close.'

  I held my mother's hand, thinking of the one white peak that never moved, that was always waiting like some fat lady god on the horizon when you pulled back the curtains. No matter what had gone on the night before.

  'Any road up,' my mother snapped out of it and gave my hand a lively rub, 'we lived to tell the tale, didn't we?'

  I found myself falling in love with the edge of Auntie Vera's toast, where the crusts were always slighdy burned and butter

  caught without meking, so you got a glob of it on your tongue.

  'I love you,' I told Auntie Vera while my mother was out, traipsing after a job and a house. I knew it was a sort of betrayal, but I wanted never to leave her kitchen where the fresh laundry dangled, like floppy angels, over our heads on the rack. Thick towels baked close to the ceiling too, letting off lavender when the door opened and stirred the air. Then there were potatoes, bubbling night after night, to be drained out of their milky water and mashed. Everything: vanilla and Dettol and ashes you thought of eating, even the spike of inky coal that pricked your nostrils. Our hot-water bottle had its own drunken gurgle, different from the others, when Auntie Vera filled it up for bed.

  'I love you,' I confessed over my crusts.

  When she took me on the bus to face my Eleven-Plus exam, my mother let me sit on the top deck and held my hand all the way. I had to do the test by myself in Bury Town Hall, since all the eleven-year-olds in Lancashire had done theirs while we were in Canada. My mother and I hurried past the dozing guard and down long dusty corridors to a room thick with smoke and tired ladies' perfiime.

  'There you are, luwie.' A secretary handed me the stub of a pencil that someone had got their teeth into before me. On the wall above me, the Queen was smiling without looking happy under her crown and lots of heavy-looking fiir. I filled in all the spaces and gave the pencil back, not even stopping to nibble the chomped end.

  'Good gracious, that was quick!' The lady smiled. 'Litde Einstein, are we?'

  My mother looked at me with tears in her eyes when the results came through the post.

  'You're to go to Lancashire Grammar.' She smoothed the creases out of the letter, caressing it as if the results were her own: 'Passed with flying colours.' ,

  I munched the celebratory pink marshmallow biscuits, then bolted down to the catde grid to balance back and forth along the poles, dreaming, the sun on my neck. When my cousins came legging up to slap me on the forehead, teasing me about my brains, I went to crouch on the edge of the quarry. I stared down into the yellowy pit at the rotting sheep skull that had made me heave the first time we stumbled on it.

  'Don't be mard.' Our cousin Joe poked my chest with the same stick he used to poke the skull. 'It's only piddlin' nature.'

  We watched flies buzzing in the eye holes, holding our breath at the stink, wondering where the rest of the body had got to. The neck was hacked, shrivelled flesh and bits of windpipe drooping in the dirt.

  'That's not nature,' our older cousin Patsy decided, after a closer poke. 'That's people, that is.'

  Every night, after washing my hands, my mother let me slip the white letter out of its long brown envelope for one more gander in front of the fireplace. I went to bed fiiU of the ancient brick grammar school and the blue-and-gold tie I would wear. There would be French, Latin and algebra every day, and at night, with my books backed in brown paper, I would dash home in patent leather shoes to balance along the poles without scuffing.

  In the middle of shepherd's pie one night, our mother cleared her throat.

  'I've found myself a job,' she said, and we all stopped chewing. 'At my old nursing home. Looking after the old crumblies again!' She sort of laughed.

  'Trouble is,' she laid down her knife and fork, 'it's in Manchester, so you know we'll have to leave the countryside.'

  Auntie Vera looked at her plate. Laurie looked at me.

  I gulped my peas. 'Does it have anything to do with grammar school?'

  'Well, Andy, love,' my mother took up her knife and fork to carry on eating as if nothing was up, 'it'll be too far to go to the grammar.'

  'But they've got one in Manchester, haven't they?'

  'Actually, love,' my mother shook her head, 'I'm afraid they've no grammars where we're going.'

  My tumbler of water trembled in front of my face. 'No grammar whatsoever?'

  'No grammar.' My mother chewed while she spoke. 'But they've loads of comprehensives to choose from, Andy. It's all new-fangled, like, in the city.'

  I bowed back over my shepherd's pie, grinding bits of grisde that had got into my dreams, with gravy, under the mashed-potato roof

  We clambered on to the bus with all our belongings, then waved goodbye to Auntie Vera, who soon shrank to a funny-sad smudge. The green world withered, and a grimier one shot up. Blocks of curved towers loomed, with shirts and stockings dripping out of the windows. The Bull Ring, our mother called it, crammed with skinheads and pensioners and dark-eyed families flown in from far away. We gaped at smashed glass and grafiiti shrieking Fuck OffWogs, Paki Scum Go Home.

  'Don't worry,' our mother muttered when we wondered what the flats looked like inside, 'we'll not end up anywhere like this.'

  Lost black ladies, boys in turbans, bald men dangling fags, all gazed into the clouds or down on to the pavement. I imagined living with them, everyone baked in at the windows like currants in a concrete cake.

  'Don't you worry.' Our mother turned her back on the high-rise estates and fixed her eyes on the road ahead. 'We're not that bloody desperate!'

  Everything we owned was stuffed into our single surviving suitcase and a pile of plastic bags whose handles
gouged our fingers, making raspberries of the fingertips. We got off the bus in the centre of Chorlton and dragged our things down strange streets. When the strap of the suitcase snapped off, we had to shove it over the pavestones, stiffening our backs so as

  lOI

  not to seem common, while its hinges screeched and its flowery sides bulged like a fat lady with bellyache,

  'Seventy-two, Denton Road.' Our mother muttered her way down the shabby street. We would be staying with Auntie Jackie, the lady who used to live next door to us on Thornton Road when we were little. We scoured doorways for what was to be our future.

  Door-window-door-window-door-window-door, with the odd house boarded up. There were no spaces between them, unlike the ones at Auntie Vera's, which were built out of blond stone and clumped in twos. Here, the sky stood still, over streets blessed with nothing that could be called a garden: splurges of dusty hedge and the odd clump of dandelions. Our eyes dived into front room after front room.

  'Enough nosing,' our mother panted, pausing in her wresde with the suitcase to prise our gazes away from bedraggled curtains and twitching sooty nets. Chorlton would be posh, she had promised, while we were packing at Auntie Vera's.

  'Where do they keep the trees?' Sarah asked, sparking giggles that slumped into silence. We followed our mother's frown down the road full of lamp-posts, where there were no leafy branches swaying against slate greys and brown brick. My eyes fell back to earth, snagging on dog turds and gutted fag packets. Flaps of newspaper strewed busty ladies along the broken pavement.

  'Here we go.' Our mother halted. 'Seventy-flamin'-two!'

  Black paint flaked off a door whose window panes had been smashed into glass webs. Someone had stuck them together with Sellotape, which had rotted to the colour of wee. We hauled our things through the whingeing wrought-iron gate.

  'It'll only be making do, mind,' our mother whispered after ringing the bell. 'Just for the time being.'